Forum Digest: Weapons Technology & Tactics

Beam Weapons

The primary offensive weapons in Outsider are various forms of beam weapons.
The maximum range at which you can normally expect to score a
hit with a beam weapon on a maneuvering target is about 1 Light Second (approx. 300,000
km); any farther away than that, and the delay between the
arrival of your targeting radar pulse and your beam reaching the
target becomes such that the target may have changed vector.
The Loroi heavy beam weapons such as the pulse cannon and
superheavy blaster are effective out to this distance; Umiak
heavy beam weapons can score a hit
at this distance, but need to be closer (150,000 km or closer,
the closer the better) to penetrate screens. Umiak ships
are very heavily armored and screened, and aren't shy about
taking damage in the first place, so they press in as close as
they can and blast away.

Since the Loroi units are usually faster, they like to play hit
and run (or "fire and maneuver", as they would prefer
to say), but the Umiak have a number of methods for inducing
them to stand and fight. The most obvious of these is to attack something
the Loroi must defend.

The Loroi also use fighters, which in the old days of the empire
used to be their primary offensive weapon; in the war against
the Umiak, the fighters have mostly been relegated to a fleet-defense
role. The Umiak, who evolved on a low-gravity planet, are not
very G-tolerant, and so their smallest vessels are 100 m
gunship-class vessels that are large enough to carry their own
artificial gravity generators.

Beams in space should theoretically be
invisible... but they won't be in Outsider. I could theorize
that with gigawatt lasers there's so much energy that there
would always be enough photons interfering with each other and
bouncing off in various directions that the beam would always be
visible... also, interplanetary space is never truly a vacuum --
there's always some little bit of matter hanging around for
photons to bounce off of. But the real reason is that it's difficult in a comic
to depict invisible beams, and visible beams look cool.

The laser is a good, basic beam weapon: it's a tight beam of
photons that can be projected over great distances. The
drawbacks are that the beam loses intensity over distance (and
light is hard to "corral" back into a tighter beam at
distance), and the light/heat damage component is probably
fairly easy to deflect, absorb or ablate with high-tech armors.
Light is probably not greatly affected by electromagnetic
defensive screens, so lasers would be screen-piercing weapons.

The particle beam (or blaster) is a beam of charged or
neutral particles that should be better at penetrating armor
than a laser. The potential problem is keeping the beam focused;
particles (especially charged) are likely to spread faster than
coherent photons. Neutral particle beams were probably the first
version of the blaster in service; these would have been
relatively short-ranged. At higher tech levels, I presume ways
are found to substantially extend blaster range; I imagine a
sort of particle helix, where opposed "braids" of
particles of opposite charge loop around each other, keeping the
beam focused for extended distances. Assuming that this sort of
configuration could extend effective ranges out to about half a
light-second, the blaster would replace the laser as the
standard beam weapon. The main drawback of charged particle
beams is that they are probably easily deflected by
electromagnetic screens. Both the Loroi and the Morat have
their own versions of the blaster; the Morat version (which the
Umiak use on some ships) does more basic damage, but the Loroi
version is better at penetrating armor.

The idea behind the plasma focus (or plasma beam) is that you
have some mechanism for focusing plasma into a tight beam over
very long distances. I imagine some sort of "carrier
wave" that accomplishes this long-range cohesion... here
we're talking pretty high tech, even for the aliens, so only the
Umiak and Historians have really mastered this technique. The
advantages of the plasma focus are very high power and very good
armor penetration/ablation; the disadvantage is limited range.
The Historian version uses a different focusing mechanism than
the Umiak version, and has significantly longer range.

When the Historians gave the Loroi the plans for a dumbed-down
version of their plasma focus, it was still too advanced for the
Loroi to copy exactly. They could only get it to work in short
bursts. The result was the Loroi pulse cannon, which sends
pulses of plasma down the carrier wave to the target; it doesn't
do as much damage as the Umiak plasma focus, but does
significant damage at much longer ranges.

I imagine that the historical order of development of these
systems went like this:

Given the fantastic energies required to push these starships
along at 30G, I think that the energy requirements of most
conventional beam weapons are going to pale by comparison. I'm
assuming that as long as a ship has main power, it can fire any
or all of its weapons that are ready to fire; a ship can
probably accelerate at full thrust and still have energy to fire
all of its weapons. The rate of fire of most beam weapons is
going to be limited mostly by heat management and mechanical
issues. Cooldowns would probably be measured in minutes.

A
tightly focused beam weapon would maintain integrity for an
eternity of empty space...

No matter how tightly focused, beams diverge or
"spread" over distance resulting in a larger
"dot" on the target. In a laser, where all the photons
have the same wavelength, divergence is fairly small, but in
white light, where the photons have a variety of frequencies,
divergence is much larger (as the photons of different
frequencies interact and interfere with each other). This is
what I meant when I said the range of a "white" beam
weapon would be sharply limited. White light won't "hold
together" for even a fraction of 1 LS. White light diverges
so badly over even a few dozen meters that they've even started
to use lasers
for applications as simple as theatre
projection systems.

At a distance of 1 LS, there's a two second delay between the
arrival of the light pulse that tells you where the enemy is,
and the delivery of the beam on target. In those two seconds, an
enemy ship accelerating at 30 G can move from its expected
course (in an unknown
direction) 588 meters (which is about a single ship length for a
battleship). Add to this small accuracy errors, and I'd guess
the odds of scoring a hit are somewhere below 50%. Hence the use
of the phrase, "maximum range at which you can normally
expect to score a hit." Certainly, a hit can be scored at
greater range, but requires some luck as you don't have a target
"lock." The relative speed of a target in space is
mostly irrelevant as regards targeting; the computer knows the
vector, and can easily calculate where the target will be when
the weapon pulse arrives. Only the amount of the target's acceleration
produces uncertainty for the targeting computer, and
acceleration in space is the same no matter what your current
velocity is. So, going slower is no advantage.

I'm
skeptical about the feasibility of accurately focusing a beam
from turret aboard an accelerating, maneuvering ship against a
target 300,000 km away. I would think you'd have to use a fixed
spinal mount, and point the whole ship at the target.

Even today's
mechanical telescope tracking mechanisms are more accurate than
what would be required to successfully paint a target at the distances we're
talking about. A large turret on a half-million ton starship
seems like a pretty stable platform. But in any case, if that
accuracy seems so hard to achieve for a turret mounted weapon,
how is pointing the whole half-million tons of starship to
that same accuracy supposed to be any easier?

The non-official response is: it depends on the race. The humans
probably use a fusion torch or fusion-powered ion drive (the
Bellarmine drive plume was blue... perhaps cadmium ion). Loroi
and Umiak both have ships that can sustain 30G acceleration for
extended periods, so I guess the only drive answer for them that
makes sense is some sort of reactionless drive powered by
matter/antimatter reactors.

Both from a technological and story point of view, I'm more
concerned about powerplants than drive mechanisms. Science
fiction is rife with elaborate drive mechanisms that free the
ship of a need to carry reaction mass, from Star Trek's
"warp drive" to Niven's mystical "reactionless
drive", to Clarke's dubious "quantum ramjet" from
The Songs of Distant Earth. I'll do myself a favor by
saying as little about the drive systems as possible. You're
right, though, that its' important to know the basic qualities
of one's candidate system... for example whether your reactor
will go critical if it is damaged or shuts down.

Personally I expect that any military power system, even a
matter/antimatter powerplant, has to be able to quit cold in the
event of a failure in order to even be considered as viable.
Matter/antimatter containment has to be power-safe, so that a
ship losing power won't explode like a supernova. Loss of power
has to be considered a normal occurrence in a warship, and I
don't see the Star Trek: Voyager idea of ejecting your
reactor core in an emergency (not to mention hunting it down and
re-inserting it later) as a serious damage control concept. That
said, a direct hit on the reactor area might still cause such as
explosion, and I think that has to be considered as part of the
equation (similar to the interesting but unevenly applied Mobile
Suit Gundam concept that you had to be careful where you
shot a mobile suit, lest its nuclear reactor go critical).

And, with all, that, I don't want to eliminate the visual
vocabulary of the space opera starship. Engines have bright
"outlets"; weapons have "barrels." Why not?

I often
wonder, but can never be bothered to think through, this simple
thing - at stupendous speeds in real space, how much drag is
actually created by the particles floating around in space. I
know there aren't many, but at huge speeds, you'd still be
hitting quite a few. at certain flight speeds in atmosphere it
is better to have a constant cross section than a seemingly more
aerodynamic shape. Is it possible that something similar could
come into play for very large starships?

Perhaps, but that would have to be a really huge starship... space
isn't empty, but it's really, really close, even inside a
typical nebula. However, there might be examples where some
streamlining could be beneficial, such as operating in very low
orbit (where the planetary atmosphere starts to be a factor), or
in dust clouds (such as the Naam proplyd).

It
takes an Outsider starship 28 hours at full acceleration (30G)
to reach 10% lightspeed from a standing start; from zero
velocity it would travel 83 LM, or 10 AU, roughly the distance from the
Sun to Saturn. Assuming you have enough fuel, you can
theoretically continue accelerating from there, but to do so
would be reckless; you're going to need several days and several
solar systems' worth of stopping room. Only military vessels
would generally go as fast as 10% lightspeed, and we assume that
since they have screens designed to protect them from gigawatt energy
beams, self-induced cosmic rays are probably not going to
present much of a problem.

But yeah, if you plow into a gas cloud at 10% C, you're probably
in big trouble, regardless of whether your ship is streamlined.

What
about cloaking devices?

Cloaking, or the Star Trek concept
of being able to turn one's ship into a magically undetectable
space-submarine, doesn't exist in Outsider. Stealth, the ability
to avoid detection from enemy sensors
by absorbing or
deflecting the detection medium, exists in Outsider, but is
impractical in most applications. The massive energy output of
starships able to accelerate at 30G against the cold background
of space is almost impossible to mask, considering the passive
and active detection mechanisms possible at this technology
level. Electronic Counter-Measures (ECM), or the ability
to confuse enemy sensors with jamming and false signals, also
exists, but will probably be useful only at relatively close
range.

Missile
Weaponry

There are three types of missiles in use; the first, mass
drivers (a.k.a. "rail guns" or "gauss
weapons") are dumb projectiles that are only useful at very
close range, and are employed only by the more primitive
secondary races (including the Humans).

Second is the AMM, a high-velocity, short-range missile used for
point-defense by the Loroi.

Third is the long-range missile (or torpedo), used by the Umiak.
These are sophisticated unmanned craft the size of a small
fighter, similar in concept to the "drones" described
in the Star Fleet Battles game. Torpedoes are used at long
ranges to counter Loroi standoff tactics, and also en masse
(along with swarms of gunships) to draw Loroi fire off advancing
Umiak heavy capital ships. Large and expensive, only the
industrially mighty Umiak could afford to use them in numbers
large enough to be effective, and they do.

Kinetic-kill weapons and bombs are great damage-wise; the
trouble is getting them on target. Ballistic (non-guided)
weapons such as mass drivers can be very effective at close
range where there is a reasonable probability of a hit, but at
longer ranges against targets that can maneuver, they are fairly
useless. They still work great against stationary targets (such
as space stations and ground installations) at any range,
though. Good old Newtonian physics.

Nukes or antimatter bombs or torpedoes would also cause a lot of
damage, but again the problem is to get them on target -- beam weapons can strike with accuracy at great
range. In Outsider, a torpedo is a small unmanned drone ship,
powered by the same reactor/engine that powers the larger ships;
it heads toward the target at very high acceleration, and when
it gets close enough, it ignites its remaining fuel and causes a
big (thermonuclear or antimatter) explosion. However, even at a
burn of 30G, it would take more than 23 minutes (from a standing
start) for a torpedo to cross the 1 light second of a beam
weapon's effective range. That's a lot of time to be
intercepted. This is why torpedoes in Outsider, while used by
most races, are considered an auxiliary weapon (except by the
Umiak, who have the resources to use torpedoes in large enough
numbers to saturate the target's defenses).

I define a torpedo as a
guided missile that uses a ship drive. Normally a torpedo would
have to have at least twice a ship's acceleration to be useful,
so for the Bellarmine (~6G) that would probably be around
12G. Since the powerplant is probably fusion, it doesn't need a
warhead; it can just light off whatever fuel it has left, and
boom: thermonuclear explosion. I say "probably" because we'll never know;
hypothetically, if Terran vessels ever do enter combat in the
story, they'd probably have access to better ordnance provided by
their allies. Tempest could easily outrun a Terran
torpedo.

From
what I've read, a fusion reactor that suffers a catastrophic
failure merely is a whole bunch of vented, star-hot plasma, not
"fusion nuke in a can". It takes a LOT of effort for
there to be fusion...

This isn't a
failure situation, it's a triggered overload. If you can make a
fusion reactor work, you know how to make hydrogen fuse under
controlled conditions. If you know how to make hydrogen fuse
under controlled conditions, you can probably choose to turn
your fusion reactor into an H-bomb on command.

Of
course, if your "really primitive" missile can do 12
Gs, you don't even need to bother with a warhead, in some ways.
Just pack the front end with a huge hunk of depleted uranium or
a similar dense metal...and get it up to a significant fraction
of lightspeed. At 12 Gs, that happens PRETTY quickly. Want to be
even nastier? Load it up with a whole bunch of basketball-sized
spheres of dense metal, and release them in a shotgun pattern
before impact. At high fractions of C, that hunk of dense metal
is going to make a nuke look like a firecracker.

Kinetic
kill weapons are always preferable, provided you can deliver
them on target; if you're skeptical about getting a fusion
warhead close enough to the target to damage it, you can forget
about actually making kinetic contact with the target. Using a
"buckshot" warhead will improve your chances of a hit,
but not by much; once you go ballistic, the enemy can get out of
the way and you can't compensate. And I'm not sure what you had
in mind about a "significant fraction" of lightspeed
being achieved "pretty quickly" at 12G, but it would
take a missile more than 70 hours to reach 10% lightspeed
at a 12G burn. It's unlikely that any torpedo would have that
kind of fuel or time to accelerate, and if it did, it would be
going too fast to maneuver well enough (at 12G) on target to
achieve a hit.

Again, we're not positioning Terran torpedoes as superweapons;
on the contrary, they're quite backward compared to those of
their combatants.

Define
"close" in terms of point defense and armor.

Not as close
as you'd need for a kinetic kill. If you think it's possible for
a torpedo to get close enough to ram an enemy ship, then it's
surely close enough to damage it (and possibly others) with a
thermonuclear or antimatter explosion.

Besides,
there's one use for missiles and torpedoes that most people
don't think of in space combat-controlling your enemy's
movements. Using ballistic weapon salvoes to channel an enemy
towards where you want him to go, or deny him a direction to
maneuver.

The
only high-tech race that still extensively uses torpedoes (the
Umiak) do so for just this sort of reason: to pin the enemy and
tie up his defensive fire while their ships close to optimum
beam weapons range. But for any race other than the industrially
mighty Umiak, torpedoes are too expensive for such a
proposition.

Based on Arioch's comments about
Loroi farseers not being able to detect electronic/computer
brains, perhaps a good tactic against them would be to use ai's
to pilot torpedoes or other remote type weapons.

Certainly, torpedoes and
other such tactical weapons are going to be unmanned. In
tactical situations, the Loroi use the same sorts of sensors
everyone else does; only in the case of strategic movement is
their Farseer sense useful. In order to gain an advantage, the
Umiak would have to send entire fleets of unmanned starships
into Loroi territory.

Is
it worth the effort?

It
would be expensive... the vessels would have to be fitted with
extensive automation systems, and even so wouldn't be able to
compensate for damage or unusual circumstances as well as a
living crew. Controlling the fleet would be the biggest problem;
without FTL comm you can't control it remotely, and without FTL
sensors, you don't know exactly where your targets are
beforehand, so the ships' computers would have to be autonomous.
As a substantial body of classic science fiction hints to us,
creating robotic berserkers is an extremely dangerous
proposition that tends to bite one in the ass. And remember; the
fleet wouldn't be invisible to normal Loroi sensors; the odds of
such a fleet being able to sneak past the front lines undetected
are questionable; once detected, the Loroi could defeat the
fleet normally. It would be a hail-Mary pass, a desperation
move... and currently the Umiak are not desperate.

With
nukes today, you have to have a lot of tech to make them. But in
space, just plain kinetics can cause a lot of damage. So even
the most primitive space faring culture can launch a
planet-killing attack. Of course, the more effective your
engines, the easier that is to do.

Yes, that's
very true. We've had several threads' worth of discussion on
planet-killer "doomsdayweapons", so let me summarize them for you:
destroying the surface of a planet is
not very hard, even with
our technology today. Getting your weapon to that planet past
the front lines guarded by the enemy's starships is very hard. It's the battle trying to
get past the enemy fleet that you need to worry about; once you
win that, the enemy planet is at your mercy; even the smallest
escort vessel has enough firepower to obliterate
the surface of a planet. A
bigger or better planetkiller warhead will not help you in this
fleet battle, the fight that really counts. There are no
superweapons in Outsider; if there were, the Loroi-Umiak war
would not have lasted 25 years.

My
Question: what is the effect of EMP weapons against the Umiak?

Even today,
military equipment is shielded against EMP. This isn't complete
protection, as it can still be overloaded by a strong enough
pulse. But, considering that in Outsider most weaponry consists
of high-energy beams, I think it's logical to expect that most
of the military equipment is going to be very well-protected
indeed. Which brings us to the second point:

One
would think the Loroi would end up detonating gigaton scale
nukes in orbit of Umiak planets.

If the Loroi were close enough to be able to light off nukes in orbit
of Umiak planets, the Umiak would have a lot more to worry about
than EMP; the Loroi would simply destroy everything on
the surface. And for Humanity, lighting off nukes on Earth in
attempt to frazzle invading Umiak seems a bit self-defeating; if
you're going to ruin your own planet, you might as well just
surrender. And, as has been mentioned, you're as likely to fry
your own systems as the enemy's.

It's certainly possible that the higher-tech races could come up
with a smaller, more directed EMP device, but the only use I can
see for such a weapon would be to stun or disable an enemy
at a relatively small scale. For
those instances in which they might be interested in
capturing a live Umiak, the Loroi have much more
effective telepathic methods for obtaining prisoners.